Makes a Mockery

I finished reading "The Fall of Númenor" over the weekend. Like a lot of the recent "Tolkien" books, it struggles to put together a coherent narrative from a great many disparate writings. This one was largely successful, however, filling in a lot of the blanks about the Second Age. (I daresay if you had read all of "The History of Middle Earth" and other books, there probably isn't anything new here for you. I hadn't, so I enjoyed it.)

But my biggest takeaway from the book is a reinforcement of just how weak "The Rings of Power" really is. This is true on three main fronts. The first is the timeline - in the book events play out over centuries and even millennia, while in the show, even if it runs for the mooted ten seasons, it will cover a decade at most. This means, for instance, that there are a scant few years between the founding of Barad-dur and the Last Alliance, instead of the half an age in the book.

The second is the handling of Galadriel, who in "The Rings of Power" just isn't the character Tolkien wrote.

The third is thematic. Númenor, as presented in the book, is as close as possible to paradise on Earth. The Men of that realm are rewarded by the Valar for their aid against Morgoth in the First Age. They are also given one instruction: don't try to travel further West. And, partly due to the nature of mortal pride, and partly due to the influence of Sauron (although the latter only towards the end), people gradually fall away from that ideal and rebel, at first in small ways and finally in calculated defiance of that one edict. And so, they bring their doom on themselves.

In "The Rings of Power", Númenor is presented as being close to that worldly paradise, and being populated by essentially good people being led by essentially good rulers. Númenor, in the show, is set to be destroyed by a natural disaster, just because.

I guess much of this is inherent to the source material that RoP is working with - they have access to only key, small parts of Tolkien's work, notably not including the work here, and so they have to make do. But given that, I can't help but feel that they'd have been better just... not?

#21: "The Fall of Númenor", by J.R.R. Tolkien (edited by Brian Sibley)